The Quality that Wasn’t There. Francesco Patrizi’s Panpsychism and the Concept of Incorporum

Francesco Patrizi’s panpsychism is centred around the notion of animus understood as the domain of what he calls the incorporum, a rather odd adjectival form in Latin. Patrizi distinguishes between three nominalized adjectives – incorporeum, incorporum and corporeum – to indicate the general states of life and knowledge affecting all things in the universe. The result is an original fourfold combination of qualities (distributio quadripartita) : the absolutely incorporeal (intellectus), the corporeal incorporeal (animus), the incorporeal corporeal (natura) and the absolutely corporeal (corpus). This article argues that by introducing the feature of the incorporum between the corporeum and the incorporeum, Patrizi developed a very original variety of panpsychism in which matter (the stuff of which things are made) is not a substance (materia prima), but a flow of life (fluor), that is, a transition from degree to degree within a continuum of energy (lumen explained as spatium activated by lux).